Barry Kenna

“For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world. During September I kept hoping that some morning, as by magic, all books, pictures, records, chairs, beds, curtains, lamps, china, glass, utensils, keepsakes would drain away from around my feet, like the outgoing tide, leaving me standing silent on a bare beach.”
― E.B. White, Essays of E. B. White

“This longing to commit a madness stays with us throughout our lives. Who has not, when standing with someone by an abyss or high up on a tower, had a sudden impulse to push the other over? And how is it that we hurt those we love although we know that remorse will follow? Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves. To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself. —Henrik Ibsen”
― Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

“Schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder are often spoken of by laypeople – I used to do it myself – as if they were definitions as precise as those for hepatitis or appendicitis. In reality, the names are no more than those given to a collection of symptoms observable at a certain moment in time.”
― Patrick Cockburn, Henry's Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, A Father and Son's Story

“The trouble today,” he wrote, “is that the Communist world understands unity but not liberty, while the free world understands liberty but not unity. Eventual victory may be won by the first of the two sides to achieve the synthesis of both liberty and unity.”
― E.B. White, Essays of E. B. White